Ali Bahrami Dynamic assesment
Write the first paragraph of your page here. Section heading Write the first section of your page here. Section heading Write the second section of your page here. Dynamic assessment By: Ali Bahrami Taking the dynamic assessment into consideration there are many diffinitions. Assessing children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds can be a complex task. One alternative to standardized testing methods is dynamic assessment. Dynamic assessment (DA) is a method of conducting a language assessment which seeks to identify the skills that an individual child possesses as well as their learning potential. The dynamic assessment procedure emphasizes the learning process and accounts for the amount and nature of examiner investment. It is highly interactive and process-oriented. The following chart compares features of a traditional (or static) assessment procedure to the dynamic assessment procedure. So, Dynamic assessment is an interactive approach to conducting assessments within the domains of psychology, speech/language, or education that focuses on the ability of the learner to respond to intervention. Dynamic assessment is not a single package or procedure, but is both a model and philosophy of conducting assessments. Although there are variations on several dimensions of the model, the most consistent characteristics are as follows: The assessor actively intervenes during the course of the assessment with the learner with the goal of intentionally inducing changes in the learner's current level of independent functioning.  The assessment focuses on the learner's processes of problem solving, including those that promote as well as obstruct successful learning.  The most unique information from the assessment is information about the learner's responsiveness to intervention.  The assessment also provides information about what interventions successfully promote change in the learner (connecting assessment with intervention).  The assessment is most often administered in a pretest-intervention-posttest format.  The assessment is most useful when used for individual diagnosis, but can also be used for screening of classroom size groups.  The model is viewed as an addition to the current, more traditional, approaches, and is not a substitute for existing procedures. Each procedure provides different information, and assessors need to determine what information they need.  The underlying assumption of dynamic assessment is that all learners are capable of some degree of learning (change; modifiability). This contrasts with the underlying assumption of standardized psychometric testing that the learning ability of most individuals is inherently stable. Research with dynamic assessment has demonstrated that determination of the current levels of independent functioning of learners is far from a perfect predictor of their ability to respond to intervention. Dynamic Assessment, with its roots in Vygotsky’s theory of mind, takes the integration of assessment and instruction much further by enabling the leader in this dialogic dance to optimally promote learners’ abilities by continually fine-tuning their mediation to the learners’ changing needs. In fact, central to DA is the tenet that cognitive abilities can only be fully understood by actively promoting their development. DA overcomes the assessment–instruction dualism by unifying them according to the principle that mediated interaction is necessary to understand the range of an individual’s functioning but that this interaction simultaneously guides the further development of these abilities. In the context of assessment, Vygotsky proposed his famous concept, the Zone of Proximal Development, as a means of capturing both developed and developing abilities. As a logical corollary to the view of abilities as internalized forms of mediation, Vygotsky argued that what individuals are able to do in cooperation with others indicates their future independent performance. Consequently, traditional assessments, which isolate individuals, should be abandoned in favor of procedures that require examiners to mediate examinees’ performances in order to reveal the full range of their abilities. Moreover, because mediated interactions are the driving force of development, this type of assessment is also an instructional activity. Vygotsky himself emphasized the implications of the ZPD for assessment, as in his research on IQ testing, but foremost in his thinking was how development could be promoted through interactions that are sensitive to the ZPD. When Luria introduced the ZPD to colleagues in Europe and the USA, the quantitative and qualitative orientations immediately attracted attention. In part, this was due to the dominant traditions in testing, which called for objectivity through standardization and statistical analysis. The two broad schools of thought on DA, interventionist and interactionist, are introduced; their strengths and drawbacks assessed and key studies in their research literatures discussed. Interventionist DA, which emphasizes standardization, offers special advantages such as the ease of generating results for large numbers of learners that can be easily compared. Of course, standardizing interactions places limitations on the mediation that can be offered to learner, thereby decreasing the chances of co-constructing a ZPD. Particular attention is given to interactionist DA, which is more in line with Vygotsky’s vision of how the ZPD can be used to reorient education to learner development and is therefore more relevant to the classroom. The ideas on the zone of development were later developed in a number of psychological and educational theories and practices. Most notably, they were developed under the banner of dynamic assessment that focuses on the testing of learning and developmental potential. Dynamic assessment procedures vary on a number of dimensions, but primarily with regard to degree of standardization of interventions, as well as regarding content. There are four basic models that fit most of the procedures: 1. an open-ended, clinical approach that follows the learner, using generic problem solving tasks such as matrices (e.g., Feuerstein et al.). The approach to intervention focuses on principles and strategies of problem solution and aims to promote independent problem solving. 2. Use of generic, problem-solving tasks, but offering a standardized intervention all learners is provided with the same intervention involving principles and strategies for problem solution (e.g., Budoff, Guthke, et al.). These approaches tend to focus on classification of learners, attempting to reduce the negative results of cultural bias. 3. A graduated prompting procedure where learners are offered increasingly more explicit hints in response to incorrect responses. All learners' progress through the same menu of prompts or hints, varying with regard to the number of prompts required for task solution (e.g., Campione, Brown, et al.). 4. Curriculum-based approaches that use actual content from the learner's educational program, with interventions based on "best practices" of teaching. These can vary regarding degree of standardization of interventions (Lidz, Jepsen, et al.). These approaches focus on IEP development for learners with special needs.